


Extreme Paths

by manic_intent



Category: Ghost of Tsushima (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Yakuza, Light Bondage, M/M, That Yakuza AU where Jin is the oyabun and Ryuzo one of the lieutenants, Yakuza
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:06:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26095333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manic_intent/pseuds/manic_intent
Summary: Ryuzo stifled a yawn and checked his phone as he waited with the rest of the saikō-komon for a one-on-one audience with their new, mysterious oyabun. As he slouched down further over the uncomfortable plastic chair, Kosei nudged him in the ankle. “Sit up,” Kosei muttered, low enough that only Ryuzo could catch it. “Don’t look so bored.”“He’s taking his time,” Ryuzo grumbled, though he obligingly sat back up. “Who is this guy, anyway? I thought you were next in line.”
Relationships: Sakai Jin/Ryuzo
Comments: 21
Kudos: 103





	Extreme Paths

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liquorlips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liquorlips/gifts).



> Prompt by liquorlips, who asked for a Jin/Ryuzo yakuza AU: recently appointed oyabun!Jin and saikō-komon/first lieutenant!Ryuzo, dark!Jin.

Ryuzo stifled a yawn and checked his phone as he waited with the rest of the saikō-komon for a one-on-one audience with their new, mysterious oyabun. As he slouched down further over the uncomfortable plastic chair, Kosei nudged him in the ankle. “Sit up,” Kosei muttered, low enough that only Ryuzo could catch it. “Don’t look so bored.” 

“He’s taking his time,” Ryuzo grumbled, though he obligingly sat back up. “Who is this guy, anyway? I thought you were next in line.” 

Their previous oyabun had been angling to retire for years due to failing health, and everyone had assumed that Kosei was going to be named his successor. This morning’s announcement had come as a total shock to everyone at the bakecho network that Ryuzo ran. Which was, admittedly, a bit embarrassing, given that digging up interesting dirt was the Agency’s speciality. The oyabun deciding to retire effective immediately, and naming a total outsider to their ranks? Unheard of. Maybe the old man had finally gone senile. Either way, Ryuzo didn’t expect New Guy to last long.

Kosei glanced at the door, the sole exit to the back room of the bar. The persistent, smoky scent of yakitori mingled with hard liquor and cigarette smoke, making Ryuzo hungry and grumpy. “He’s someone you know,” Kosei said, keeping his voice low.

“Really?” That got Ryuzo’s attention. “One of my informants? Or—”

“What’s the rush?” Kosei closed his eyes. “You’ll find out soon enough.” 

“Your leg’s twitching and your hand’s been going to your pocket every few minutes for that cigarette pack that isn’t there anymore,” Ryuzo said, watching Kosei twitch. “Nervous about something, old man?” 

“Watch yourself,” Kosei said. He glanced up as the door opened and got up as his name was called. Ryuzo exhaled, rechecking his phone. By the time he was the last person in the room, Ryuzo was dozing against the old cracked wall, strung out in confused dreams of smoke and charred flesh. When Kosei shook him awake, Ryuzo flinched and slapped away his hand. 

“Room down the back,” Kosei said, hard-eyed. “I’d tell you to watch your tongue, except you’ve never been one to listen to a fair warning.” 

“What can he do, declare me excommunicado?” Ryuzo asked, grinning as he pushed himself to his feet, trying to parse Kosei’s mood. Somewhere between tense and worried. 

“You should stop watching so many American movies,” Kosei said, his usual response to any pop culture references he didn’t get. 

Ryuzo patted Kosei on the arm and sauntered off to meet the new boss. He wished he’d thought to smoke before the meeting, depressing as it was to cram inside one of those designated public cubes with everyone else sucking in their latest nicotine hit, all of them killing themselves and each other a little quicker. He scratched his jaw as he walked through the dingy corridor to the room at the back, rap-rapping the door. 

“Come in,” said a voice that sounded a little familiar. 

Someone he knew. Ryuzo let himself into the room, still trying to figure it out—and fell back against the door with a yelp. A dead man sat at the head of a round table slotted with empty chairs, an old light bulb dangling above, spitting light into dusty corners in uneven blinks. “K-Kazumasa-san?” 

The man blinked—then tilted his head in a puzzled frown that was all too familiar now, from over ten years back and counting, when he’d been skinnier and thinner and soft. “Fuck,” Ryuzo said with a shaky laugh, “Jin? You look so much like your old man. Gave me a fucking turn, I thought you were a ghost for a second. How have you been? Haven’t seen you for years.” 

“I’ve been keeping,” Jin said. He looked better than ‘keeping’—the soft kid Ryuzo remembered had hardened into a reflection of his steel-eyed father, folded into a sharp suit and tie that looked well-tailored.

“You a salaryman now?” Ryuzo asked, looking Jin over before he remembered why he was even here. “Well, shit, I don’t know why you’re in this room, but. I’m meant to meet my new boss, and you shouldn’t be caught in here so, just tell the guys outside you were looking for the bathroom and if—”

“Ryuzo,” Jin cut in. He leaned back in his chair, pressing his hands together over the table. “I _am_ your new boss.” 

“Ha, very funny.” 

Jin exhaled. “This must be why Kosei told me to talk to you last. Sit.” He waved Ryuzo to a chair. 

“This isn’t a very elaborate joke?” Ryuzo asked, still frozen between disbelief and horror. Pressure built within his chest, pushing laughter into his throat that he tried to swallow—badly. Jin frowned at him. 

“ _Sit_ ,” Jin said, with a bitter edge to his tone that Ryuzo had never heard before from a friend he’d once thought far too soft for the world. Ryuzo’s legs folded, but he somehow managed to fall sideways into a chair, blinking. Jin tilted his head again, considering him. 

“Man, what happened to you?” Ryuzo asked, though he could guess. 

The double murder of Jin’s parents, still unsolved. Ryuzo had cribbed enough cash from petty thievery and odd jobs by then to be long gone, trying to eke out a new life in Osaka. He’d read the newspapers in disbelief, then tried to call Jin, then Jin’s house. Nobody answered. Ryuzo had foregone breakfast to buy a crappy little condolence card and the cost of postage. After that, he hadn’t given Jin further thought, busy as he was trying to make rent. Jin’s family had been rich for _centuries_ , fuck. He was the descendant of some centuries-old daimyō clan, same as his maternal uncle. Ryuzo had figured that Jin would just sort things out, get therapy, and move on with his life. 

This sure as hell didn’t look like Jin moving on. Not to anywhere Ryuzo thought he would. “I got your card,” Jin said. 

“Right, ah. Sorry.”

“About what?”

“It was kind of cheap,” Ryuzo admitted, “and I didn’t know what to say, so. I probably wrote something shitty, if at all. Tried to call you.” 

“I wasn’t in any state to talk for a while,” Jin said, smiling a hard, uneven smile. “I appreciate the sentiment, however.” 

“Is this about what happened?” Ryuzo asked, bewildered and groping for context. “Losing your parents?” At Jin’s faint nod, Ryuzo let out a loud laugh. “What the hell? Jin, you were born rich. Your uncle is rich _and_ powerful, fuck, he’s in the Diet, isn’t he? Bruce Wayne didn’t turn to the mafia.” 

“You haven’t changed,” Jin said with a snort. “You used to bootleg all those American movies even though you didn’t understand English. Pester me to translate what was happening while the film played.” 

“Don’t need anyone to do that for me now,” Ryuzo said. He still downloaded films rather than wait for them to crawl through Japan’s painfully slow release schedule, but he also understood enough English now to follow what was happening on his own. It helped that the films he liked best didn’t tend to be too deep. “What are you even trying to do? Find out who did it? Jin, you could’ve come to me any time.” Ryuzo used burner phones for work, but he’d kept his old number, linked to a charged phone in a drop site. Tearing away entirely from his previous life hadn’t ever felt right.

“I didn’t know what you were doing until I got involved with the Mugiwara-kai.” Jin studied Ryuzo. “Why did you end up joining the yakuza?” 

“You don’t even get to ask me that. I still can’t believe that you’re the oyabun.” Under Jin’s stare, Ryuzo said, “The Agency was looking for temps, and I was looking to eat, so I signed on and got to stay.”

“Now you run the Mugiwara-kai’s bakecho network, and at your age. You’ve done well.” 

“Wasn’t too hard. The place was run and staffed by dinosaurs before I got involved. My previous boss barely knew how to use a computer.” As a deputy, Ryuzo retrained or shifted legacy staff and brought on younger people. Hackers like him, who could find anything they needed to off the internet. It’d been Kosei who had recommended him to the position of saikō-komon, after Ryuzo had dug up enough blackmail on a local police chief to get a couple of the shatei released from custody. “Don’t even talk about age. Hell, we’re the same age, and you’re the fucking _oyabun_. I don’t even understand how that happened.” 

“You don’t need to know,” Jin said, studying Ryuzo evenly. “Kosei said that Kojiro might be trouble, but that he and the others would eventually fall in line. You, however. He warned me about you.” 

“What?” Ryuzo had always been on good terms with Kosei—or so he thought. “I’ve never been disloyal.” 

“It isn’t about loyalty. He said that given your nature and our shared history, you might not take me as seriously as you should.” 

Stung, Ryuzo said, “It’s a shock, sure, but—”

“We were friends when we were children. That was a long time ago. I have work to do, work that I need the Mugiwara-kai to do on my behalf. Work that will be easier if I have its respect. The Jin you knew is gone. You cannot continue to address me the way you did before.” 

“No more friends, just useful minions?” Ryuzo said, his lip curling to bare his teeth. 

“There,” Jin said with his cold new smile. “That attitude of yours again. I won’t be unreasonable. You will be given a grace period to adjust, as will the others. After that, I won’t be so understanding.”

“All this to find out who killed your parents?” 

“I’ve known who killed my parents for a while,” Jin said, sitting back, the sputtering bulb cutting his face into deep shadow. “I’ve only just grown ready to go to war.”

#

The bloodletting began in a week. A kigyuo shatei who’d also made several Batman jokes was found hanging from his balcony: ruled a suicide. One of the kyodai died in his shower; wrists sawed open by a butter knife. After that, everyone tiptoed around their new oyabun. The stories spread, each more unbelievable than the last. That Jin was secretly the son of the previous oyabun—Ryuzo had laughed at that one. That Jin was some sort of bakemono in human form, more vengeful spirit than man.

Ryuzo had shivered when he’d heard that. He’d kept his head down, mindful of Jin’s warning. It worked for a month, and then he’d gone drinking with some of his staff and hell, after enough shochu, fuck warnings, sometimes Ryuzo wouldn’t even remember his name. He’d started telling a convoluted story in the izakaya about their childhood that’d felt hilarious at the time, especially since everyone else kept laughing, laughing as they drank and stuffed themselves on yakitori. Things had gotten murky after that. 

Waking up with his cheek mashed to the rarely-vacuumed floor of his flat, Ryuzo knew that he’d fucked up. Someone had removed his shirt, goosebumps picking down his tattooed skin in the chill. He tried to move his hands, but they’d been bound behind his back in leather cuffs, linked with a strap to a thick collar around his throat. As Ryuzo looked around wildly, he noticed a pair of polished black shoes near his shelves. Shoes indoors? It pinged Ryuzo with a visceral wrongness that pierced through the alcoholic fog. “Shoes, man,” Ryuzo croaked before he could help himself. 

The shoes moved closer. Ryuzo coughed as Jin hauled him to his knees by his hair, crouching at eye level. Still in a gorgeous suit, not a hair out of place. “I warned you,” Jin said. 

“Sorry,” Ryuzo managed to say, blinking slowly. “I messed up.” 

“That story you told the others. Tell it to me.” 

“Hey, I’m sorry, all right? I got drunk and—” Ryuzo hissed as Jin’s hand tightened in his hair. 

“Tell it to me,” Jin repeated, his gaze unsettlingly blank. “Make me laugh. I haven’t laughed in years.” 

Stumbling over the words, throat dry, Ryuzo obeyed. Telling the stupid little story about how some manga became wildly popular among the girls in school, turning into some sort of girls-only cult secret. That because Ryuzo loved secrets, he’d found a copy through less than legal means, and had dragged Jin over to the vegetable patch behind the school to read it. The first godsdamned yakuza story they’d both ever read: some sort of messed up manga about a pretty boy photographer who tried to take some snaps of a hot oyabun and had naturally gotten in over his head. That damn, was this what girls their age liked to read? Yaoi manga about pretty boys getting fucked with film canisters? That Ryuzo had turned to Jin to maybe laugh it off and found his friend very quiet and very red— 

Jin stroked Ryuzo’s cheek as he talked, which was somehow kind of worse. Ryuzo would’ve preferred having that hand locked in his hair, or a knife at his throat—he understood the language of violence far more intimately than whatever this was. He trailed off with a mumbled, “Sorry,” and waited, defeated. 

“You’re too valuable to kill,” Jin said, patting his cheek. “Lucky you. Also, Kosei asked me for mercy on your behalf. However, you still need to be punished.” 

Ryuzo was going to miss his little finger. Still, better than not waking up at all. “Free my hands, and I’ll use the kitchen knife.” 

“Yubi-tsume? No. It’s an increasingly outdated practice for a good reason. Hard to blend in when you’re missing part of a finger. Neither am I sure that it’d fix the problem. Part of you still sees me as the kid you used to drag along to your pranks.” 

“I won’t do it again, I’ll—”

“I know you, Ryuzo. You haven’t changed that much.” Jin smiled thinly. “Did you like the manga?” 

“W-what?” 

“Faindā Shirīzu, I think it was called. The manga in the story that you found so funny while drunk.” 

Ryuzo stared at Jin, then realisation dawned. To his dull horror, he couldn’t stop the laughter clawing its way out of his throat. “Good luck trying to find some film canisters in this day and age,” Ryuzo said, because hell, maybe he was also going to die in some slow and terrible way here, begging an old friend for his life, but he’d never been able to grow a mouth filter worth a damn. 

Jin glared at him. “You don’t appear to be taking this as seriously as you should.” Jin got to his feet, slowly removing his belt. “Even like this, you look so much like a half-feral dog.” 

An insult like that would’ve pissed Ryuzo off when he was younger, as the bastard son of a single mother. Now? He didn’t give a fuck. Hell, insults usually only made him laugh. He bit that down, though, showed just his teeth. “Feral dogs bite,” he said, “so good thing I’m not all that, hm?” 

Ryuzo shifted closer, mouthing over the growing bulge in Jin’s pants. Fingers twisted in his hair and jerked him back. A flicker of uncertainty crossed Jin’s eyes before it shuttered away, and Jin relaxed his grip, allowing Ryuzo to lean in, to manage the catch in Jin’s pants awkwardly, then the zipper with his teeth. He breathed in, because why the fuck not at this point? Still half-drunk on shochu and old memories, on this terrible bleeding edge of banked violence that he could sense from the man before him, no longer the boy he knew. 

Jin drew out his thickening cock and growled as Ryuzo leaned in to lick the tip. His hand clenched in Ryuzo’s hair, and Ryuzo got the hint. Awkward trying to keep his balance for something like this without his hands, but somehow Ryuzo managed to get most of Jin into his mouth, gagging only once at the weight on his tongue. Jin let out a tiny sound, the only hint of his pleasure other than his hardening flesh. He pushed deeper, watching as Ryuzo choked and fought his gag reflex, until he’d worked his way down Ryuzo’s throat and Ryuzo was nosing against the curls at the root, trying to breathe. 

“I did think about looking for you,” Jin said, stroking Ryuzo’s cheek, smearing a tear from his eyes across his grizzled skin. “I missed you, the way I missed everyone, at the lowest point of my grief.” He began to move, slow but inexorable, holding Ryuzo still. Jin’s breaths grew shallower, but his voice stayed steady. “My uncle told me to move on. Finish my degree. Go into business or politics or both.” Jin made a hoarse, snarling sound. The bakemono, trying to twist free from under Jin’s smooth skin, wrench loose from his beautiful suit. Ryuzo whined, breathing in the scent of its musk, choking as it stretched his throat. Fingertips dug into the meat of Ryuzo’s neck, against the base of his scalp. “There will be no moving on,” Jin whispered as he thrust. “Nor am I interested in justice. Only in vengeance. Complete vengeance.” 

Ryuzo moaned as Jin thrust harder, his jaw aching, mouth watering under the intrusion, gagging and yet trying to lean in for more. Trying to suck made him choke and cough, Jin’s hand clenching tight as his teeth grazed Jin’s cock. After that, Ryuzo just tried to concentrate on breathing. On the weight on his tongue, on whatever Jin was saying. Fuck. There wasn’t going to be any hiding how hard Ryuzo was in his pants after this, which was probably going to piss Jin off further, but that was a future!Ryuzo problem. 

“So no,” Jin said in a low hiss, with a brutal jerk that made Ryuzo squirm and choke. “No more friends. Only people I can use.” With a final snarl, Jin ground deep, pulsing down Ryuzo’s throat. Coughing, Ryuzo somehow managed to swallow most of it, though he was gasping as Jin pulled away, blinking and a mess of tears and saliva and come. Jin walked out of Ryuzo’s line of sight in the direction of his bathroom. The tap came on and off.

By the time Jin returned, impeccably put together, Ryuzo had caught his breath. He stayed quiet while Jin walked in front of him, trying to will down the last of his erection. Didn’t work. Jin’s unsettling gaze flicked over Ryuzo slowly. He stroked Ryuzo’s cheek, then pressed a thumb over his stained lips. “This is me letting you off with a warning,” Jin said. 

Through sheer effort of will, Ryuzo forced down the quip on his tongue, muttering, “Thank you for the lesson, kumichō.” 

Something hungry burned in Jin’s eyes as he inclined his head. Releasing the catch on Ryuzo’s wrists, Jin got to his feet, stalking out of the apartment. Once Ryuzo could no longer hear footsteps, he stumbled over to his bathroom, fumbling desperately with the zipper on his pants.

**Author's Note:**

> He does look good in a suit ;) 
> 
> \--  
> twitter: @manic_intent  
> prompt policy, original stuff, etc: manicintent.carrd.co  
> \--  
> Modern yakuza supposedly came about because of ronin, so. IDK if the Straw Hat ronin in Ghost of Tsushima were named that way because of One Piece (since Zoro and Jin share a Japanese VA), but out of sheer laziness, I’ve named the yakuza in this fic after the Straw Hat pirates with the modern suffix (so Mugiwara-kai).  
> http://www.japansubculture.com/resources/yakuza-terminology/
> 
> The Finder series (Faindā Shirīzu) by Ayano Yamane is also the first Yakuza story I ever read. I’m sorry Ryuzo. The art is really pretty though cough.


End file.
